New Soulslike from the makers of Pokémon leaves a lot unsaid after 90 minutes

We’ve been long overdue for a dog-game renaissance. For the last several years, cats have been the go-to animal friend in video games. The acclaimed 2022 indie Stray is the best-known example of the trend, but it seems like everything from Final Fantasy 7 Remake to Crimson Desert to the Yakuza series has some kind of kitty-centric side content or viral moment. And though I’m almost certainly in the minority here, I’ve had enough of cats in my video games for a while. So when I saw the trailer for Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation, which prominently features a shaggy, wolflike dog, I was intrigued. When I read the marketing logline that described the game as a “one-person, one-dog action RPG,” I was locked in.

You probably know Game Freak as the studio behind Nintendo’s Pokémon games, from all the way back to the series’ origins in Red and Blue, to last year’s Legends: Z-A, and 2027’s hotly anticipated Switch 2 exclusive Winds and Waves. It’s an intriguing change-up: a studio known for its kid-friendly catch ‘em all RPGs is making a crunchy action game with shades of Monster Hunter and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. How’s that gonna work?

I had the chance to find out at a recent demo of Beast of Reincarnation in Los Angeles hosted by Game Freak, where I spent 90 minutes with the game ahead of its Aug. 4 release. Rather than the typical mid-game demo slice, I experienced the game’s opening sequence in this near-final preview build. And right off the bat, this is a game that wants you to know it is not a Pokémon game for widdle babies, but a combat-forward experience for tough customers who like their curries spicy. Beast of Reincarnation is a challenging game, even though the difficulty can be adjusted at any time. But too much of that challenge, at least in the opening stretch, comes from not explaining core traversal and combat mechanics clearly. Even so, the worldbuilding and progression systems left me wanting to see more, despite these onboarding hiccups.

From a storytelling perspective, things start out promising. It’s the year 4026, a thousand years since the collapse of civilization. Humanity has evolved beyond the need for emotion, and all those bottled-up feelings have caused everyone’s souls to deteriorate. The resulting miasma has harmed the natural world, causing animals to become massive and monstrous, overgrown with tree roots and unnatural blossoms. The opening cutscenes don’t overstay their welcome, and make a convincing case for spending time in this visually compelling and intriguing world tinged with melancholy and ruin.

You play as a Purifier — a person who is tasked with dispatching these mutated creatures, known as Nushi — named Emma,. She’s got a spiffy samurai-meets-gorpcore look to her, topped with a woven triangular hat and a cascade of blooming flowers in her braided hair. She’s accompanied by an ill girl dozing in bed and her shaggy white and gray wolf-dog, Koo. Our heroine is making her way across what used to be the Kanto region of Japan, in a cool-looking vehicle that’s a cross between an AT-ST from Star Wars and a funky mid-century Airstream trailer. The vehicle suddenly screeches to a halt and you disembark: all those Nushi we’ve been hearing about aren’t going to kick their own asses.

You emerge in a hail of laser blasts, taking down mutated animals and ambling androids as you go. The Nausicaä-esque scenery is all quite lovely to look at, and I bumbled into a couple blasts as I tried to soak it all in. Once you make it through the gauntlet, you encounter Shion, a human enemy who appears to be working at cross purposes to Emma. Before we can unpack all that, though, we’re taken back to five months earlier in the ruined village of Ogouchi, where you’re tasked with finding a “blight-stained” girl. Trees wither to nothing as the Nushi approach, and ancient golem robots with incandescent lungs offer a last gasp of warning: it’s a world that’s lush, awe-inspiring, and quietly terrifying all at once.

Ogouchi is where you get your first taste of the full Beast of Reincarnation experience — and where the game dumps its entire toybox over your head all at once. The cold-open sequence introduced the most basic of inputs — how to sprint, melee attack, and block. But there’s so much more than that: ranged attacks, finishers, Koo quicktime-meets-magic abilities, Emma’s charge attacks, and multiple skill trees for stat upgrades and additional combat abilities. As I explored the village and the underground base beneath it, the demands of basic combat and traversal quickly became a comedy of errors.

Tap the R2 button and Emma’s hair can be used as a zipline to get to high places and cross gaps. But it took me about 45 minutes to realize you can also create temporary horizontal bridges with her hair, if you hold the R2 button. Problem is, there isn’t a clear aiming reticule for either version of the skill, so I spent far more time than I’d have liked either barfing out vines somewhere I didn’t want them to go, or fiddling with the camera to see if I could make a target for the zipline appear.

Back in May, 007 First Light’s Malta sequence proved a tutorial can be comprehensive, engaging, and move the story forward. There’s none of that here. While I understand the impulse to keep the pacing lively, Beast of Reincarnation’s explanations of fundamental mechanics were just too minimal. Once I reached a campfire — where, like many Soulslikes, you can save, heal, and upgrade Emma and Koo’s stats — I noticed the game’s robust in-game tutorial codex. I would hope that all this information (and more!) is in there. If I were playing this without an artificial time constraint — as most players will — I would have spent more time digging around the tutorial menus.

But I didn’t do that. So by the time I got to the first serious boss fight, a Nushi in the form of a towering stag, I didn’t have a grasp on half the skills the game expected me to be fluent with. Part of me expected that this fight would be a good occasion for the game to explain more advanced combat mechanics, like finishers and the two bars charging for Emma at the bottom of the screen, but nope! I assumed the bars triggered something akin to Kratos’s Spartan Rage in the God of War series, but whenever I activated it, a reticule popped up, I mashed some buttons, and I left myself open to a massive wallop. I still don’t know what it actually does!

Am I annoyed and a little embarrassed by my time with Beast of Reincarnation? Yes. Do I want to keep playing it? Also, emphatically, yes. There’s a robust learning curve, but I’m intrigued by the potential for customization and the story being set up here.

And I want to pet Koo as much as possible.

Beast of Reincarnation will be released Aug. 4 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.